


metamorphosis

by renquise



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Gen, M/M, Self-indulgent worldbuilding and metaphors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-02
Updated: 2020-09-23
Packaged: 2021-02-28 18:53:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23452009
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/renquise/pseuds/renquise
Summary: Essek turns fifteen, twenty, and still does not find the shadow of another person in himself.
Relationships: Essek Thelyss/Caleb Widogast, Essek Thelyss/Original Male Character(s)
Comments: 35
Kudos: 190





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This was largely written before the Explorer's Guide to Wildemount and its frickin delightful Essek revelations came out, so kindly roll with the way that this is going to be merely canon-adjacent. :Db

There are not many other children in Essek’s crèche group. Only one, really. 

They play together as children. They like finding the housepet spiders in the echoing hallways of the compound, their delicately-woven webs across the corners. The cook teaches them their names and how to distinguish the oldest among them, an excellent hunter who makes her home in the wine cellars and spins beautifully-symmetrical webs across the spaces between the barrels.

“She’s good luck, see? Always makes webs with twelve sides,” the cook says. 

The cook later proudly shows them the preciously-guarded silkworms of their den. They used to put the cocoons out to dry, she says, on the day of the sun. She tells them how they stifled the worms changing in their cocoons, boiled the silk cocoons carefully, then reeled the strands onto twelve-sided wheels to make fine silks, each unique to a den. 

He and his friend spend hours watching them weave their cocoons. He finds an escaped silkmoth on his windowsill once. Its pale, soft wings are a wonder. He cups it between his palms, considers loosing it to the night, and then brings it back down to the rows and rows of cocoons.

One day, his friend occupies his child’s body with adult poise and speaks of battles beyond his lifetime. 

Essek turns fifteen, twenty, and still does not find the shadow of another person in himself. There are no more playmates, by then. The cook gently shoos him out of the kitchens, saying that she might get in trouble for letting a young drow like him associate with an orc. 

It is perhaps for the best. He dives into his studies. The first time he glimpses the fabric of time and space feels like the closest he’ll ever get to the awe and fervor that the beacons inspire. He wonders if this too might be worship. 

The next time he sees his friend, it is with centuries of fine cloth draped around his narrow child’s shoulders, a record of past lives that the dens kept in safekeeping until its soul returned. Essek taught himself to read them: his friend wears a stern slate-grey that speaks of a military past, and, shockingly, an almost-hidden rust-orange stripe that speaks of a lifetime spent as a bugbear. When he is presented to the Bright Queen, she wears folds and folds of silk around her shoulders, lifetimes upon lifetimes in silver-grey, the seams between the pieces indistinguishable in its soft sheen. 

It seems terribly heavy.

When he becomes a candidate for consecution, his umavi sits him down at a loom and starts his weave for him at last.

He is sixty and his shoulders are too bare and too light.

—

Much later, he meets his childhood friend again at a ball, recognizing the unexpected stripe of rust in the grey of the crowd.

Essek approaches him, careful to only wet his lips with the plum wine—it is strong, and he needs his wits about him. 

His shoulders are still conspicuously bare, with only the long drape of a cloak and the adornments of the office of Shadowhand. He wonders if it comes off as a boast, now. There are few others in court who are on their first lifetime, and none so highly placed as him.

. He’s a new soul, an unknown quantity in the web of previous lifetimes. He knows that he is smart, he is skilled, and that the one who finds himself as his partner might gain influence through him. More and more, the offer of friendship from those around him seems to come with an underlying motive of courtship. On one memorable occasion, an acquaintance offered him a hideously expensive skein of fine cotton thread that could only have come from far, sun-drenched places—a blatant courting gift, if ever Essek had seen one. 

“It’s lovely, isn’t it?” his acquaintance said, as if they both weren’t aware of its value and its implications, its political weight almost a threat. “Someone as clever as you should be able to make something nice of it.”

Essek declined as gracefully as he was able to, and promptly did the very mature thing of avoiding all contact with the man. He had already hidden in the rest rooms of this party for an hour, in the hope of avoiding him here, too. 

But no matter his dislike for these rituals, there is still the expectation that he will find someone to accompany him through lifetimes, to tie him into the intricate weave of relationships at court. 

He goes to the theatre occasionally, and the vogue these days is for narratives of lovers finding each other in one life, then another: intricate interconnected pieces that pick up in other plays, creating a web of possible continuities between narratives. It’s no doubt inspired by the Bright Queen and her partner, and it’s undeniably romantic. There is something pleasing and intricate in finding the pieces of one playwright picking up the weave of another. 

It is also a trend undeniably tied to their current politics: an appeal to not let this chain be broken by the interference of exterior forces, an appeal to continuity and tradition, an exaltation of the Luxon. Some playwrights are more subtle than others. Essek prides himself on being able to discern the genuine believers, those who are writing to curry political favour, and those who are doing something different altogether with these motifs.

No one speaks of the beacons as anything less than sacred. He sits in the audience and thinks of heresy. 

He's learned how to go through the motions of worship, how to gather scant bits of knowledge from ceremony. He’s learned very well how to make himself into what he is expected to be.

Before the ball, his umavi had applied deliberate circles of golden dust to the hollow of his palms, one then the other. It reflects the low light beautifully, an intimate glimpse of deep gold in the shadow of his palm. Any drow would spot it immediately for what it is, an invitation meant for close, candle-lit spaces, places where a turn of the palm becomes a glimpse of lambent gold against velvet dark. An invitation to return home with gold on their own skin. The implication that those hands could weave something fine and beautiful.

He holds his wine glass in the tips of his fingers, careful not to smudge his palms. He takes another long swallow of the wine, then threads his way through the crowd to find the man with the rust-orange stripe on his shoulders.

If he is to ever do this, his old friend is a good option: someone familiar, yet with some experience to guide him through it, as his umavi recommended. It’s a smart choice, and one that he could use to his advantage, a tie that could be leveraged if necessary.

His childhood friend takes him home and presses him into the covers, his body strong and firm from his time in the field. They are of an age, to a few years.

“I’m your first, aren’t I,” his friend muses, taking off his gloves. “You’ll have many lifetimes, many lovers more, I’m sure. But there are few firsts in our lives, and I am honoured to be one of them.”

“As you should be,” Essek says, dry. Trying for flirty, perhaps.

Even now, the way he speaks—it feels like someone entirely different.

His friend puts his hand to Essek’s cheek.

“Do you know how the court speaks of you? Smart as a whip and lovely as a moon-plum, they say. And just as ripe and sweet, I’ll wager.”

Essek almost rolls his eyes, but restrains himself. He can bear a few terrible over-trodden poetry similes for the sake of this process. Worse yet, some eager, shameful part of him relishes those words, turns towards them like nightblooms to the moon, desperate for an outside confirmation that his attempts at poise are successful.

His friend draws his hand down Essek’s neck, slipping the buttons open with practiced ease.

“No one has ever touched you like this,” his friend says, drawing open Essek’s collar and touching the bare skin of his neck. “Lovely indeed.”

There is something hot and covetous in his tone that makes Essek draw back, his blood beating loud in his ears. 

It made Essek’s belly twist, suddenly unsure. It’s ridiculous. 

But that gulf suddenly yawns between them, unknowable and opaque, and Essek’s stomach turns from its unseen depths. He shies away from the fingers in the hollow of his throat, from the pulse of unknown lives, unknown people under his friend’s skin.

“I—” he says, pushing back his friend—this stranger with a friend’s face. He clutches his collar shut. “I should take my leave.”

The man looks disappointed, but pushes himself back, reassembling his clothing and drawing his gloves back on. 

His first is many years later. An older drow infantryman with an calm disposition and no lifetimes hidden behind his eyes and no heavy cloth around his shoulders. The man lays him down in an inn room, takes Essek in his mouth with easy appreciation and afterwards guides Essek’s hand over his cock, and it is pleasant enough. He kisses Essek in the morning when he brings a light breakfast up to the inn room: a handful of slightly bruised moonplums and a fresh sweetroot pastry that speak of trying to provide some of the luxury he surmised Essek was accustomed to, for all of Essek’s efforts to hide his identity. Essek kisses him goodbye and ensures that they would not awkwardly meet again. 

He does’t take many lovers, after that. None, really. Too busy staying afloat in the demands of court, too conscious of the social leverage a liason might grant over him, too fascinated with the unfolding intricacies of dunamantic research to give it much mind, too indifferent to the concept of liasons in general. It doesn’t feel like something that he can try lightly. The fallout from a failed relation seems as though it would take down everything he’s worked so hard to build.

If Essek is honest with himself, he doesn’t mind having the excuse of being too busy. It helps to deflect the prying questions, at least. If he acquires the reputation of being cold, out of reach, so much the better—that, too, is something he can leverage.

—

It is many years later that he sends a letter to the Assembly. Out of curiosity, out of desperation of finding some connection beyond his immediate sphere. It takes him years to find a method of contacting them without trace, and years more to propose heresy and treason. It feels almost inevitable in its slow progression, until it feels the only option left to him.

His heart pounds in his ears when he infiltrates the sanctum of the beacons. He rehearsed the motions of it for years before putting it into action, a pleasingly complex abstract puzzle to be solved, and now, it comes together like a pattern taking shape under his hands.

He sends the beacon to the Assembly with a shipment of marble, and feels only relief that it is out of his hands. Excitement and pride are slower to come, riding giddy on the back of the news that it was safely received and that work can finally start.

The Bright Queen hears of the theft, and Essek watches her straight shoulders crumple, as if collapsing under the weight of lifetimes. The captain steps up to grasp her shoulder, then puts a hand to her elbow, catching her weight. There are tears in the Queen’s eyes when she looks up, grief and fury mingled. Essek’s throat goes dry.

The court starts to speak of war soon after. He is asked to create a spell to dilate time in the interrogation chambers. It is conceptually fascinating work, and deeply concerning when he stops to think about it. He doesn’t.

Later, he thinks of the beacon making its slow way through the wide wastes of Xhorhas, to the muddy swamplands, and then to green, grassy hills, to places he read of, but never saw. Thinks of the souls cocooned in the beacon, stifled in the sunlit grasses, spilling out onto those unknown lands. Thinks of the yet-unknown dead that would come and nestle in the beacon, pupae slowly dissolving to become something new.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Me: GOD I LOVE HEISTS I AM DESPERATE TO KNOW HOW ESSEK MADE OFF WITH A BEACON AND GOT AWAY WITH IT LIKE A ONE-WIZARD DUMPSTER FIRE OCEAN’S 11
> 
> Also me: does not write the heist because heists are hard to write 
> 
> (someone please write the heist)


	2. Chapter 2

When a motley group arrives at court and presents one of the stolen beacons to the Bright Queen, the first thing he thinks is: Oh no. There it is. 

He thinks that he does a passable impression of diplomatic calm while silently screaming.

It’s been months since the Queen sent a recovery mission for the beacons, which appear to have disappeared off the surface of the earth for all intents and purposes. It’s as if they never existed. Essek spent many, many long nights trying to narrow down where they could have gone, how anything could possibly be swallowed by space and time both. 

For a long time, he suspected that the Assembly’s research had led them to breakthroughs that allowed them to hide the beacons. After all, the Assembly has been disappointingly close-lipped about the developments of their research. They contacted him for the first time in years to ask him if the Dynasty managed to repatriate the beacon, and Essek told them with no small amount of pettiness that he knew as much as they did, and that he cannot be reasonably expected to steal a priceless artifact again if some people insist on misplacing them. 

The reply was curt. For a few months, Essek stepped into court expecting to be treated to the effects of his own prison spell and left to rot in the wastes, but eventually decided that the Assembly hadn’t followed through on their implicit threat.

All that to say: until now, Essek was fairly sure that he was the only person in the world who knew that neither the Dynasty nor the Empire had any idea where that beacon might be.

And now, there it is. All evidence points to a vast, careful conspiracy and the combined powers of two empires overturned by seven (nine?) vagabonds and a weasel. It would be funny if it wasn’t terrifying.

When he has the chance to think about it, two-thirds into a bottle of wine, he finds that this might present an opportunity. This group could be a potential solution to his predicament: a band of outsiders with unknown motives who could plausibly have reason to be involved with the theft of the beacons. Perhaps an easy way of shifting suspicion from himself. He need only volunteer as their chaperone to maneuver them as necessary.

It’s a pretty good plan, he thinks, finishing the wine bottle and opening another.

He very soon finds out that it is, in fact, a terrible plan. 

A little blue tiefling now has a direct line to his head. They make an astonishing, blasphemous daylit tree in the middle of the manor they are gifted. They keep on inviting him to dinner and giving him cupcakes. They have managed to thoroughly mangle all his plans, and worse yet, they had no intention of doing so.

Still, something can be salvaged from this, surely. He can at least keep an eye on this unknown quantity and act accordingly.

The intensity of the wizard’s gaze, the way that he gathers his hair to expose his nape with measured, deliberate movements when they speak—it speaks of someone familiar with these games. Essek has a handsome face, and he has never been above using it to fulfill his goals. The wizard is cut from the same cloth as he, he thinks. He looks as though he is someone familiar with the practice of using his personal appeal to gain influence over people, even if it seems as though he is drawing on a set of skills that has fallen into disuse. 

That, at least, is familiar, and he feels as though he can recognize the same yearning for knowledge in Widogast: a connection there that can be forged for leverage.

The next time that Essek goes to meet them, he applies a deliberate circle of golden dust to the hollow of his palms, one then the other. Turns it this way and that. He doesn't know why he is doing this. After all, the implied flirtation would likely go unnoticed by a human. It’s the intention that counts, perhaps.

Widogast gestures at his hands when they meet to teleport off to another location. “Ah, Essek, may I ask what this is? Is it necessary for a spell?” 

Essek could play it off. Say that it is necessary. Say that it is court wear. He folds his hands against each other and tucks them into his cloak.

Jester’s eyes go wide. “Es-sek! Wait, I think my mom told me about this. Or, wait, no, I read it in a really good book! Is this, like, you wearing a really cute lacy undershirt and leaving it open like ooo look at my tantalizing sexy glimpse of cleavage?” 

Essek considers teleporting to the middle of a southern Xhorhassian bog and laying in it.

Beauregard squints at him. “Hey, by the way, we’re pretty sure that there's a traitor to the dynasty. That’s the only way that the beacons could have gotten out of the country. Just so you know. It’s been an intense couple of weeks.”

“You know how it is,” Yasha says, nodding sagely. “Sometimes you betray your entire country and then you die.”

“Is that an actual saying?” Fjord says.

“Nott told me that one,” Yasha says.

Essek _strongly_ considers teleporting to the middle of a southern Xhorhassian bog and laying in it.

—

War continues, and the Nein disappear for months, chasing their lost member, with only the chime of Jester in his head to assure him that they are not dead in a ditch. 

They reappear only to ask him to teleport them into a dragon’s lair. 

Essek is torn between encouraging them to be eaten by a dragon, which would be a neat way to tie up this particularly stubborn loose end and ensure that he is not woken in the middle of the night with queries about his bowel movements, and a sudden, unaccountable fear that they will be eaten by a dragon and that he will no longer be woken in the middle of the night with queries about his bowel movements.

He settles for dropping them off at a dragon’s lair and not laying awake about it for days afterwards. Caleb is strangely blurred to scrying, he finds, but the rest of them are not.

The tree remains lit through their absence. Essek wonders if the lights would dim and fail, if they were to fall. 

He finds himself glad that he can see the tree from his towers.

—

The Nein burst back into his life by negotiating a ceasefire, inviting him over for dinner and into a hot tub, including him in their efforts to shape an entirely new spell, and attempting to perform said untested breakthrough in magic on Nott in his towers. 

They call him friend.

It’s a lot.

Caleb lingers afterwards, gathering their notes into neat piles of no discernable order. He sends Nott off with a kiss to the crown of her head, kneeling at her feet to ensure that she is well and telling her that he’d be back soon. Nott still looks shaken, but gives Essek a sharp look as she leaves. He isn’t sure how to interpret it.

Essek feels—giddy. There’s energy buzzing under his skin. It was a failure, yes, but closer to anything new and innovative than anything he’s touched in years. Decades. 

“Thank you again,” Caleb says. 

Essek waves it off. “It was my pleasure. I enjoyed working with you.”

Caleb looks at him, cross-legged on his study floor, a sheaf of papers held loosely in his hand. His hands are still covered in drying clay, dark grey like the lands around most of Xhorhas. It is peeling and flaking off in delicate flakes when his hands flex, like a spider moulting its old skin for a fresh body. There is something strange and beautiful about the glimpses of his pale skin through the cracks of clay.

Caleb catches him looking.

He clears his throat and looks away.

“I know that—ah, this is not what we do, you and I. We dance around each other, and we give each other significant glances, and we do not ever mention what precisely it is that we want, yes?” Caleb looks rueful.

Essek laughs. “True enough.”

It seems ridiculous that this should seem—easier. Caleb is a foreign agent, a human, and an unknown quantity. But they operate in the same way, have the same reflexes, good and bad. Caleb must have some reason to be approaching him in such a straightforward manner.

The corner of Caleb’s mouth quirks up. “So let me ask: have you been seducing me to create a further tie to us?” 

Essek stands and turns to his desk. He pours himself a glass of wine. “Guilty as charged.” And yet, not quite. 

Caleb accepts the glass that Essek offers him. “That is a little fucked up, my friend.”

Essek takes a gulp of his wine as he turns away. It stings, somehow. Caleb doesn’t even know the full extent of what he’s been keeping from them. 

Caleb seems to misread him. He reaches out, only to draw back. “I—no, I did not mean that as an accusation. I meant—I mean only that it is familiar to me. That I understand. I do not know if you’ve heard, but I am a little fucked-up as well. I was doing the same, after all, at least at first.” 

It’s gratifying to have that confirmed. For one wild, desperate moment, Essek wants to tell him everything. The beacons, the assembly. To return his honesty in kind.

Fear chokes it back down. Fear of dying, but perhaps even more so: fear of these people knowing that he betrayed them before even knowing them. 

“Tell me. What is it that you want?” Essek says, before he can reel it back. 

He can't offer these people honesty, and he finds himself desperate to offer something, anything to keep them close. 

“Tell me truly. If it is simply knowledge, or even influence over these dealings around us—believe me when I say that I understand, and that I will try my best to help you. No favours owed.” He smiles, not sure if the joke lands. “Sincerely. I want no debts between us to cloud the waters.”

A debt is a tie, a recognition of aid rendered, and it sits ill with him to relinquish it so explicitly. If he is enough to keep these people around, without these threads to tie them back to him. Everything that he’s so carefully woven together is coming apart with their presence, and yet—

Caleb swallows and looks at him. He looks just as off-balance as Essek feels. Caleb accepted the idea of debts so easily, and it makes Essek think that Caleb is just as used to defining these relationships in neat columns of things offered and things owed.

This—whatever it is—is anything but neat and tidy.

It is a tangle, the warp tangled in the weft. Essek took such care to keep it neat. The Nein are a bright tangle interrupting the weave, setting the tension off, difficult to set into the pattern. But Essek can’t bring himself to unravel those rows, to make it neat and tidy again. 

Especially as the weave seems to be rotting under his touch, its weft of stinking guts spilling onto his hands.

Five thousand dead, they said.

It was an abstract number. It still is, somewhat. But the dead in Felderwin now wear Nott’s face, Beauregard's face, Caleb's face.

Caleb shifts, as if to stand. He seems to change his mind, then, and stays cross-legged on the floor.

He snaps his fingers, and his familiar appears in his lap, making a disgruntled sound that Caleb soothes with his fingers under its chin. It still feels strange to sit on the floor of his own sitting room, but Essek follows.

“You do not have to—” Caleb starts. 

Essek waves this away. It is a new perspective on the room. There is a scroll that rolled beneath one of the couches that he should retrieve eventually.

Caleb’s hands bloom in front of him, a frustrated gesture grasping at something impossible to express.

“I—I want so many things,” he says, after a long, long moment. His voice is rough. “I am not sure I deserve them.”

Caleb’s hands spread in the air before him again. The gesture is loose, uncertain—so unlike the precision of his hands when he casts. His hands tuck themselves into his pockets, and emerge with a delicate handful of cocoons. He rolls them between his fingers, as if counting them.

“I want to make sure my little friend finds her body again. I want to have her close and well. I want to ensure that all my friends are safe.” His eyes go blazing and blue, anger and shame warring for space. A quiet fury turned inward. “I want to atone for things I have done, and I am not sure how. I want to stop this war.” 

He swallows, and finally turns his gaze back to Essek. “I want to know you better.”

Essek feels his throat go tight. He isn’t sure what to say.

He feels caught. A fly in the kindest snare, his pulse quick and frantic. He feels as though he’s been found wanting, and does not know the shape of this wanting.


	3. Chapter 3

The bright sun of Nicodranas is heavy on Essek’s skin. It feels like a skin sloughing off under the glamour of his disguise, itching and ceaseless. 

If he squints hard against the sun, he can make out the silhouettes of crews moving over the ships in the harbor. He remembers the sun from holy days of obligation as a weak, diffuse thing, the flat outline of a disk through clouds. The sun in Nicodranas is entirely different. It glances off the ocean waves and the white walls of buildings and turns even the shadows that wind between houses bright and blue. The sheer veil he put over his eyes helps a little, but it itches. 

Ludinus D’aleth finds him easily enough. Essek tries not to be bitter that this is the first time an assembly member has directly acknowledged him in a year. 

“Lord Desran Thane, is it? Come with me, please.” Ludinus beckons to him, as one would to a recalcitrant child. His eyes look mirthful, somehow. 

Essek spares a moment to wish for his parasol and shuffles into whatever shade he can find, following.

Ludinus makes promises, as ever. Assures him that he will get his share of knowledge. Essek wonders if his promises always rang this hollow. He had no choice but to believe him, perhaps. Has no choice. 

Essek should have expected the Nein to be here. It seems obvious, now, that they would never pass up an opportunity to meddle. They put so much work towards this peace that they want to see it through, of course. Essek wants to tell them that what will happen is bound to happen regardless. Then again, he would have said that about this war mere months ago, and now--well. And now. How much things can change. 

It is suddenly absurd that this gathering in Nicodranas is the first social event he has ever been to outside of Rosohna, despite the ability to teleport anywhere he may please. He feels very, very young and ignorant of the world. It is a familiar feeling, and not a welcome one.

Essek is generally able to read a room: who is the highest-ranked of the crowd, who is making moves, ill-advised or no, who to steer clear of. All of it hard-won literacy that hardly made up for lifetimes of accumulated social connections, but at least he felt somewhat fluent in Rohsohna. 

Here, the folds of fabric are foreign, untranslatable. He has no idea if his disguise is signaling something he might be unaware of. It’s maddening. But it’s not as if sipping a drink and attempting to look deliberate about it is new to him. He is very practiced at that, at least. 

He finds out that his outfit might, in fact, be signaling: “Blue tieflings please talk to me.”

Part of him wants to know what Jester makes of this crowd, glad, shamefully glad to see her face. Another part of him feels as precarious as a length of fabric cut from a badly-strung loom, unravelling with a touch. 

When Essek thought of his plans unravelling, he had accounted for the possibility of death. There is a concealed space in his towers that would ensure that a copy of his research would survive to be found by someone with sufficient curiosity. 

He hadn’t accounted for this, this frantic, feverish despair at having already betrayed the kindness of people before knowing them. The hold of a ship with the Nein around him, finding him wanting.

\--

Caleb takes Essek aside, afterwards. 

Nott eyes him, but allows him to pass when Caleb gives her a quelling glance, squeezing her hand to tell that he wouldn’t be long. 

Caleb paces, one end of the ship to the other. 

Essek feels frantic, wanting to smooth this over quickly and silently, and yet he knows, he knows that some things must be said. 

The moment of connection in his study seems distant, now. He wonders if it was real, at all, when he didn’t dare to return the same honesty that was offered to him.

Caleb speaks before he can.

"The assembly. Did they flatter you? Ask for more of your research?” 

Essek draws back, stung. They did.

“Do you think me so easily swayed?” Essek says. 

Caleb sits up. He looks brittle, his hands dropping to his lap and fingers twisting together like dead spider’s legs. When he speaks, his voice is neutral, completely scoured of any sentiment.

“No. I think you are very canny, and that you’ve been taught to navigate treacherous currents since before I was born. But I know that when you feel as though you are alone, when you are desperate to prove yourself, the barest praise, the barest validation—it is disarming. It pulls you towards deeper waters. It is seductive, especially if those offering these praises would keep you alone, isolated. If they seek to make you feel as though you are better, wiser than those around you, that only you can understand the complexities of what they are doing.”

Essek turns away. His stomach roils. Light, but they must have found him stupid, and gullible, and young.

Caleb’s shoulders relax minutely.

“You spoke truly, when you said that I had experienced things that I would wish on no other.” Caleb leans forward, intent and blue-eyed. “I am biased, when I speak of the assembly, but I think that you can draw your own conclusions about their aims. Make no mistake, they will throw you on this pyre as well. And I do not want what they have done to people—to, to me—to be experienced by another. No one deserves that. I cannot trust you, but I wish no harm to you.”

Essek aches to ask what it was that Caleb keeps so tight in his chest. He doesn’t dare.

He hadn’t noticed until too late that his tight, perfect weave had pulled threads tight around his own throat, bit by bit, until it was tight enough that it cut his breath short and press lines into his skin. That if he tried to struggle like an animal, to untangle his hands from the intricacies of his own actions, he would garrotte himself in the process, messily and publicly. All that would be left is a nameless body in the wastes for the eagles to feed on.

The Nein now seem to be bent on cutting him free, to slice through these knots and all his hard work, all at once. He wants to trust their blades close to his skin, bright and sharp.

He doesn’t know if he is brave enough.

It's strange to realize that he never accounted for this possibility. Either he was clever enough, cunning enough, or he would die. Those were the only two possible states. Either he was good enough, or he was dead, and that was a gamble he had been willing to take. Arrogant enough that it hadn't seemed like a gamble at all, that he had foreseen all the consequences. 

He had never accounted for a third possibility, this agonizing third state of being. This in-between, caught in a chrysalis of his own making. This slow dissolving of everything he thought he was, this messy soup of organs with no indication of what he will become.

The silence drags on, and Caleb fidgets, casting his fingertips over the pockets of his coat where his components must lie. The creaking of the wood around them makes the ship seem like a living thing, a beast that has swallowed them whole.

Caleb stands, finally. “I ought to go.”

Essek catches his wrist. Forward, too forward by half, but he is tired of subterfuge. He feels so very tired.

"I didn't think it would end up like this," he says. No, that's a lie. "No. No, I knew what might come of my actions, and I did it anyway. It just seemed—abstract. Like something faintly unreal."

Caleb looks at him, face carefully neutral.

“That's no excuse, I know, and the result is the same, and, and, light above, I don't know how to unravel it. I thought I was trying to, but I don’t know if it’s enough. If I'm brave enough to do what needs to be done. I don’t want to die,” Essek whispers. “Cowardly, I know. When others have died as a result of my actions.”

It sounds manipulative, even to his own ears. It’s true, it’s truer than many things he’s told Caleb, but it still sounds like manipulation. He doesn’t recognize what is real anymore, what is a front put on for others. Is he attempting to make this right? Or is he seeking an easy escape from this mess? He only knows that he feels caught.

Caleb flexes his hand in his grip. Essek can feel the tendons in his wrist shift, the faint raised texture of scar tissue under his hands. 

Essek lets go. 

“No one can grant you absolution, if that’s what you’re asking,” Caleb says. He laughs, a short, mirthless bark. “Least of all me. But I think that you have to try. And you can't try anything if you're dead.”

Essek swallows. “It would be simpler, no?”

“It is simpler, yes, and living is harder,” Caleb says simply. He looks at his hands. “It is hard to see a future with so much uncertainty, is it not? When everything is collapsing under your hands? You won’t forget what you did. I can tell you that. But I think our gardener of graves would say that this rotting thing, this terrible thing that you tried to bury, tried to ignore—it can still grow flowers, eventually, with care.”

It is strange to hear foreign metaphors. Different stories to give shape to the world.

“Or it can poison the ground. Perhaps it is already poisoned,” he says, short and bitter. “Perhaps it was already poisoned, before any of us were born.”

Caleb shrugs. “Perhaps. But we have to try, don’t we?”

Caleb shoos his familiar out of his lap.

Caleb’s familiar comes close to him, fey and wary. It butts into his knee. Caleb’s face is still stern, carefully neutral. Essek knows that Caleb must be nudging him into his hands, and it makes his stomach twist, feeling undeserving of both the easy animal affection and the deliberate hand outstretched.

Poisonous things lay heavy on his tongue—that it won’t matter, that he can’t change anything now, that anything they do now is but a salve slapped on festering wounds. That he didn’t care before—why should he now?

“You asked me what I wanted, once. Now you, yes?” Caleb says. “Tell me truly. I would like to know.”

He doesn’t know. 

Caleb’s gaze on him doesn’t waver. It feels overwhelming.

He looks at Caleb, at this human with moon-pale skin and hair like ripe persimmons, the unfamiliar and strange made familiar. It feels too exposed altogether, it feels pathetic, and it feels like wrenching something out of himself, but he finds that he cannot stop. 

“I want to—to not let you down. Your friendship, you and your friends. I want—I don’t know. You—You all intrigue me. I enjoy your daring, your willingness to bend conventions in search of something new.” He gestures to Caleb, to all of the Nein on this ship, to the unexpected, fragile gift of their friendship. He glances away. The intensity of Caleb’s gaze is altogether too much at the moment. He swallows. “I like your capable hands. I want—I want to not be alone. But I do not know what it all adds up to. What kind of future there is for me, if any.”

He twists his fingers together. Spiders, struggling to shed their too-small skin. Larvae, struggling in their coccoons.

Caleb looks down at his hands, a little sad, a little rueful. “I cannot claim to know, either. You and I are quite the pair.” 

Essek feels his throat go thick. There are so many things he does not know.

Caleb reaches out to take his hand. He gives him plenty of time to move, if he wanted. Presses his lips to the hollow of Essek’s palm. 

His lips do not come away sheened with gold. It feels not like a promise, but a possibility, an understanding, a hand outstretched for the taking.

Caleb squeezes his hand, then releases it. “I think that I speak for all of us when I say that our company is yours, regardless of what might transpire. I do not know if you’ve noticed, but we are a tenacious bunch of assholes. We do not let go of someone lightly. I can only hope that the same goes for you.” 

As a statement, it is so definite, yet so vague. In undercommon, there would be a grammatical structure for this: markers for den and not-den, for connections from previous lifetimes and strangers, for lovers and platonic relationships, for all sorts of ties and close-woven lives. Common feels loose and ambiguous in comparison, as though the language isn’t equipped to deal with these exacting subtleties.

And yet—the ambiguity, that in-between feels like freedom. Like it might be okay not to be sure. Like there might be space to explore those possibilities beneath the roots of a sunlit tree. 

To grow. To change. To struggle from a silken coccoon.

Essek once saw a silkworm caught half-changed, its wings stunted and bent, halfway to flying. It was discarded, considered useless for silk. He had thought it fascinating and awful, to be arrested so close to freedom. 

He cannot stay forever thus, half-changed.

Essek grips Caleb’s fire-black fingertips, and does not let go.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Am I finally posting another bit of this as a way of manifesting a prayer circle for Essek to play some tiny part in the upcoming polar expedition with terrible wizard politics? Yes. Yes absolutely. Essek please shoot Jester a message I am absolutely begging you.
> 
> (Thank you so, so much for all your lovely comments on this--I can't tell you how encouraging it is.)


End file.
